“An unbelievable moment”: Inside the ambitious project to make the birrarung swimmable again
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Since forming in 2020, Regen Melbourne and a committed group of researchers, environmental advocates, Indigenous leaders, engineers, entrepreneurs and environmentalists have been hatching a plan to make Melbourne’s Birrarung (Yarra) River swimmable. Now they’re ready to put all that research into action.
“Imagine rushing out of your office at lunchtime on a hot day and cooling off in a beautiful waterway that runs through the very heart of Melbourne,” says Charity Mosienyane. “Now imagine being part of the movement that actually made it possible to swim in this river, play in this river, enjoy this river.”
Charity says the word ‘imagine’ with such purpose, it’s as if it’s the first time it’s ever been used. Like she just invented it.
Imagine.
With a background in civil and environmental engineering, Charity has spent the majority of the last 17 years working in engineering roles in the water sector in Australia, the UK and elsewhere. Now, she’s the Lead Convenor of Regen Melbourne’s Swimmable Birrarung project, a “wild and ambitious” bid to get the river, Melbourne’s life force, swimmable again.
If you’ve clapped eyes on the particularly grim limb of the Birrarung that flows through Melbourne’s CBD at any point in the last 200 years or so, you may have your doubts that this is even possible. Since colonisation, the lower part of the river has become a murky dumping ground for E. Coli, trash, pollution and sewerage – a wet and winding monument of human thoughtlessness and poor urban planning.
Of course, the river has been swimmable before. And for the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung People it has been a source of sustenance, joy, wisdom and wonder for tens of thousands of years. (And contrary to urban mythology, yes, the river did run clear prior to European settlement).
Getting us back to a swimmable Birrarung is no simple task. Not only does it involve cleaning up the river, it also involves overcoming myriad government and policy barriers, a multitude of significant legal hurdles, organising and collaborating with a city’s worth of stakeholders and drumming up support from business and industry. And that’s before you figure out who’s going to pay for it all.
Luckily, the team at Regen Melbourne – which comprises eight actual staff and around 180 supporting organisations from almost every industry and sector you can think of – has a bit of a knack for solving complex problems.
“When you hear that sections of the Thames are swimmable, that’s what gives me the biggest hope. People swim there all the time, and the river goes through the heart of THE city. It’s very different to Melbourne, but you can see the parallels.”
“Regen Melbourne is about tangible transformation, not speculative futures,” says Regen Melbourne CEO Kaj Lofgren. “We’re unbelievably ambitious and I don’t shy away from that. But we’re also visionary and specific. It’s not just stand around and Kumbaya – you can’t get more specific than making the river swimmable.”
Regen Melbourne’s broader mission is to regenerate Melbourne and bring it within the bounds of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework. The Swimmable Birrarung is but one keystone project under the Regen banner, with other projects including ending food waste in the city and regenerating Melbourne’s neighbourhoods, communities and streets via the freshly-launched Regen Streets initiative.
For Kaj, the Swimmable Birrarung project is the perfect vehicle through which we can begin to solve some of the systemic issues that are facing us both locally and globally. “Our modern economic system has led to the separation of urban life from the natural ecosystem,” he says. “In Melbourne, that’s represented most potently by the fact that the life force of our city, the Birrarung, is not healthy. So the opportunity to make the Birrarung swimmable is an unbelievable moment…one in which we get to heal this disconnection, and bring back to life the waterway that we utterly rely on.”
The goal isn’t just to have a single spot in the CBD where swimming is safe – it’s to build an interconnected corridor of swimming places for Melbournians to enjoy, and to embed inner-city swimming into the fabric of the city. And there are plenty of examples out there for the form Melbourne’s swimming future could take, like Paris’s work to make the Seine swimmable by 2025.
Elsewhere, Copenhagen’s Harbour Baths, Oslo’s inner-city fjord and even the River Thames (which, believe it or not, is swimmable in some sections), offer viable models for inner-city swimming. “When you hear that sections of the Thames are swimmable, that’s what gives me the biggest hope,” says Charity. “People swim there all the time, and the river goes through the heart of the city. It’s very different to Melbourne, but you can see the parallels.”
The Regen Melbourne team is quick to point out that they didn’t ‘invent’ this work. First Nations peoples, local and state agencies, water corporations, community groups, advocacy groups (such as the Yarra Riverkeeper Association) and more besides have been working on regenerating the river for decades. The Yarra Strategic Plan (Burndap Birraung burndap umarkoo) is a culmination of these efforts, providing a strategic direction and vision for a healthy, thriving river. But where Regen plays is as a convener and catalyst – a movement that can help accelerate existing work with more resources, ambition and capacity. “This is a collective undertaking,” explains Charity. “It cannot be achieved by one or two actors, or just by government or private industry – every single actor within the ecosystem needs to play a role.”
“You can't fight climate change with fear and survival as the only goal. You have to fight it with joy and hope. I think a Swimmable Birrarung is the ultimate beacon of what’s possible when you organise with joy and hope.”
As wonderful as the vision of a Swimmable Birrarung is, the capital-M Magic of the project is its ability to get us to care about regeneration, biodiversity and healing the environment that we’re deeply connected to. “In the light of rolling crises and the potential for apathy and withdrawal, we need to have initiatives that extend us and connect us with joy,” says Kaj. “You can't fight climate change with fear and survival as the only goal. You have to fight it with joy and hope. I think a Swimmable Birrarung is the ultimate beacon of what’s possible when you organise with joy and hope.”
For the last three years, the Regen Melbourne team has been deep in a sensemaking and insights gathering process, which has involved consulting, researching, listening, collaborating and building capacity with a huge number of actors and organisations from across the city. They’ve mapped the system of interconnected actors around the river, and re-mapped it to help them define how each actor can contribute to the work, together.
Over the next year, Regen Melbourne will work with their collaborators and the wider community of actors and stakeholders to identify, co-develop and implement a portfolio of leverage points along the river. These leverage points represent the culmination of discussion, insight, knowledge, experience within the fields of action. The leverage points are transformative projects within the river system that have power to effect transformative impact in service to a healthy and thriving river.
An example leverage point could be amplifying and extending Melbourne’s love and knowledge of the Birrarung through celebration and storytelling. A great example of this is the existing Birrarung Riverfest which the Yarra Riverkeeper Association held last year for the very first time. The festival spanned the length of the river from Port Melbourne all the way up to Don Valley, and offered a huge range of activities designed to get people engaged in and excited about their river (think kayak clean-ups, platypus spotting, artist camps and twilight paddles). “It was a complete celebration of the Birrarung,” says Charity. “I’m excited about what this festival could look like this year. I think it’ll be such an incredible vehicle to help unlock the investment we need to start undertaking projects that can help us transform the entire river.”
Though regenerating one river might seem like a drop in the ocean when compared to the magnitude of global climate issues we’re currently facing, Kaj believes the Swimmable Birrarung project is symbolic of a necessary broader shift in our approach to tackling these problems. “The Swimmable Birrarung project might seem trivial to people in light of the unbelievable crises that we face,” he explains, “but I think it’s pivotal. It’s absolutely pivotal that we give ourselves a chance to connect with the joy and the hope, and not just the existential dread.”
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